Skull and Bones’ and their kind’s obsession with death as the ultimate equalizer and their own mortality

This special report is intended to assist the Japanese audience in more fully understanding the present policies of the United States under the administration of President George Bush. It explains the thinking behind America’s military adventure in the Persian Gulf and its current attitudes toward the Middle East region.In so doing, we provide a glimpse into the most powerful organization in America–the Order of Skull & Bones. This secret fraternity is based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where many of the leading members of the U.S. government and the American intelligence community received their formal education. The Order, as it is referred to by its members, is a bastion of White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture, which is at the core of the American 20th century outlook.

Skull and Bones members, along with Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill were in the leadership of the Angle-american Eugenics Movement that created the sterilization and “race hygiene” laws in Canada, the U.S. that the Nazis cited as the inspirations for their own laws and policies on race and other issues.

The reader will learn that President George Herbert Walker Bush’s concept of the New World Order is an old idea, one which has its origins in the philosophy and beliefs of the secret Skull & Bones fraternity. Today in particular, this is the prevailing outlook of the U.S. government, many of whose most influential members, like the president himself, are part of the Skull & Bones network. These men seek to recreate the American imperium of the immediate post-World War II period [STTPML: and their British allies seek to preserve what is left of a fractured Empire and class system], an era which President Bush frequently refers to as “the American Century.”

The powerful men of Skull & Bones genuinely believe that they have a strategic and moral “right” to control world affairs. Consequently, they take upon themselves the authority to crush any rivalrous threat to U.S. imperial leadership, whether by current allies, such as Japan, Germany or Great Britain, or by Cold War adversaries, like the Soviet Union. The members of the Order, due to their narrow WASP upbringing, view with particular suspicion the maneuverings of Zionist Israel and its affluent, influential lobby in the United States.

[STTPML: Many on the roster of Skull and Bones past and present, are not only descendants of the first Puritans, and love to brag about it as if it were some kind of personal accomplishment, they were and are, like the Puritans and even Columbus also, classic anti-Semites (but their “breeding” and Yale education give them more sophisticated masks to hide behind) and yet Christian Zionists. Christian_Zionism_PhD_Thesis

On the one hand many were and are, virulent anti-Semites although a few Jews have been allowed into Skull and Bones, and one, Jacob Weisberg, turned down a “tapping” by John Kerry in his Senate office, [ http://sttpml.org/skull-and-bones-its-not-just-for-white-dudes-anymore] but as Calvinists (who believe in God’s “Preordination” of “The Elect” with their power and wealth a sign of being one of “God’s Elect”), they believe in the prophesies in the Book of Revelation that the Jews will have to gather return to Zion before “The Rapture” (when the Jews then will be cast into Hell as non-believers).

It is interesting to note that virtually all apocalyptic cults in history (like Christianity, Judaism and other religions began) thought that the apocalypse or Armageddon, or Rapture would come in their own lifetimes and that they would be among the chosen for whatever was on the other side of immutable mortality and certain death. Karl Marx burned the midnight oil and got a lot of carbuncles on his rear trying to get Das Kapital finished and published as he thought that England was on the threshold of system-threatening crises produced by the unfolding contradictions and “logic” of capitalism on the micro as well as macro levels and his analysis of the essential contradictions and “laws of motion” of capitalism had to be understood by its victims [Marx made no pretense of “neutrality” in class war between oppressors and their minions vs all those who really labor and produce appropriated surplus value]

The Zionists in Israel who use them know very well that many are hard-core anti-Semites who wish Jews and Judaism nothing good; but then again, some Zionist Leaders have never had a problem with working with Nazis and anti-Semites just as some anti-Semites have never had a problem with working with Zionists (“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) in furtherance of common objectives such as anti-Communism or the exit of Jews to Palestine and out of any resistance [in which many Jews gave their lives] to fascism–“win-win” for whom?

Bush, his fellow Bonesmen and their like-thinking elitist allies in the American Establishment see themselves as New World Order warriors, an American samurai caste of sorts, whose mission is restoring American greatness. They intend to utilize the institutional networks of the U.S. government and key private agencies, such as the New York Council on Foreign Relations, to advance their purpose.

[STTPML: Alexandria Robbins is a woman of great courage and integrity. She undertook the really first fair and dispassionate look at Skull and Bones, working diligently, interviewing over 100 Bonesmen (first time ever done by any journalist) to separate-out lore, myths, facts, sources etc on this most powerful or the power-money-immortality cults like Scroll and Key, the second most powerful secret society at Yale and of which Alexandria was once a member (hence her access to Bonesmen as they are into eugenics and inbreeding more than what was portrayed on the movie “Deliverance”.

JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the articles you wrote elicited a direct response and maybe a threat?

ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: When I wrote the first article for “Atlantic Monthly,” I dismissed Bones as a harmless organization, because my secret society didn’t have the power agenda, so I didn’t think that Bones did either. After the article came out, I got a call at my office from the New Yorker from a journalist whom I knew by name to be a member of Skull and Bones. He scolded me for writing the article. He said, I�m quoting, �Writing that article was not an ethical or honorable way to make a decent living in journalism.� He asked me how much I had been paid for the story. I refused to tell him and he hung up on me. 15 minutes later, he called back. He says, “I have just gotten off the phone with our people.” I laughed. I knew he meant other Bonesmen because I didn’t think somebody would actually say our people. He told me that the society demanded to know where I got my information. I wouldn’t tell him, of course, and then he spent the next 15 minutes or so, berating me for writing about Skull and Bones for having the gall to expose thing about his secret society. He ended the conversation by saying, �There are a lot of us at newspapers and political journalism institutions across the country. Good luck with your career.� He slammed down the phone. I was 23 then. I was an aspiring investigative reporter, so that did shake me a little bit, but what really appalled me was that I found out since that in the years since that call, this guy has been actively going out and trying to destroy my career as a journalist, simply because I wrote about Skull and Bones.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, would you like to let us know who he is?

ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: I wish I could. Don’t want to give him any fodder.

On Kerry And Women:

JUAN GONZALEZ: Alexandra, I�d like to start out – in your book, you mention John Kerry several times. For those folks who might think this is something of the college days and in the 60’s when Kerry was at Yale, but you mentioned an experience that Jacob Weissberg, the editor of “Slate” magazine had about 20 years later in 1986. Can you talk a little bit about that.

ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Sure. Skull and Bones is really much more than a college club. In fact the year that the members spend in it, their senior year at Yale (there are 15 members tapped for Skull and Bones membership each year) is really just the beginning. Skull and Bones is a powerful alumni network, perhaps the most elite network in the country and it really focuses on life after college. What Kerry did was he tried to recruit Jacob Weissberg from his senate office in Washington to become a member of Skull and Bones. And Weissberg ended up declining the invitation, but he was shocked that Kerry was a member of the society, which so clearly exhibited a history of misogyny, and he challenged Kerry on it. Kerry sort of blew him off. He said, �Oh, well, you know, you should look at my record – for women, defending battered women, et cetera,� and Weissberg said �I can�t be a part of this,� but he was shocked that Kerry would have his secretary call Weissberg into his office in the senate in order to try to make this recruiting possible.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you actually explain that, the fact that he was an intern at the “New Republic,” and he got this call, what this meant to him?

ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Yeah. He got a call from Senator Kerry’s office, from his secretary, and Weissberg was spending the semester away from Yale. He was spending it, his junior year in Washington. And he got the call, and the secretary said, �Senator Kerry would like to meet with you tomorrow morning.� And all sorts of things are going through Weissberg’s head. He was thinking, oh, maybe he likes my writing, maybe he’s going to give me a scoop. He said, �Okay, I’ll be there, do you know what it’s about.� The secretary said, �No, he wouldn’t tell me.� He gets there the next morning, about 8:30, I think. And he’s sitting in the senator’s office and the senator is kind of schmoozing him and making small talk and Weissberg is wondering why (I guess he�s about 20 or 21 by then), why he is sitting in Senator Kerry’s office and Kerry said, Kerry brought up Skull and Bones. Weissberg didn’t know that Kerry was a member at that point.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You mentioned the organization’s relationship to women. For those of our viewers who don’t know about that, could you explain that — the history of that relationship.

ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Skull and Bones has been an all-male group, was an all-male group beginning in 1832 when it started, up until 1991. And what happened was there was basically a 20-year fight between the younger members of Skull and Bones and the older more staunch old blue members. In 1991, the seniors in Bones, these are the 22-year-olds who were actually in the Tomb that year at Yale, (the Tomb is the name of their building, by the way) in 1991, the Bones seniors intended to tap women, but the alumni of the society heard about the plan, changed the locks of the Tomb and threatened to shut down the society completely. When the seniors threatened a lawsuit, Bones held a vote that narrowly endorsed admitting women, the day before initiation a group of Bonesmen led by William F. Buckley obtained a court order blocking the initiation. The group claimed that admitting women would lead to (and I�m quoting here) �date rape in the medium term future.� Eventually, Bones held a second vote that again narrowly admitted women. Both Bushes have refused to disclose which way they voted. Senator Kerry and former Senator David Born both said they voted to admit women. Once the women were initiated, several of the older members, including a former congressman who I spoke with, distanced themselves from the society.

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The Skull & Bones members believe in the idea of “constructive chaos.” By keeping their true policy intentions secret, by constantly sending out mixed signals on all critical policy issues, they consciously seek to sow confusion among both their nominal “friends” and “enemies” alike.

[ STTPML: Neo-Hegelian ultra-rightists advanced the notion from Hegel’ construct of the “Negation of the negation”: that every established “Order” (“Thesis”) generates its opposites and opponents (Antithesis), and that ongoing conflicts between Thesis vs Antithesis, lead to a new Synthesis which then becomes the new “Order” or “Thesis”, generating a new Antithesis, and the cycle goes on. For the the types that see themselves “Preordained” to “leadership, greatness, wealth and power”, these types represent to many when their masks are stripped off, smug and entitled malignant narcissists, megalomaniacs, dynasty mongers and those obsessed with some kind of fame, immortality and power. Problem and contradiction: Then in a world of chaos, even “managed ‘creative’ chaos, how to engineer a new “Order” that will celebrate, rather than hang, your kind? These “Elite” legends -in-their-own-minds types have an answer: “Managed Chaos”; Work all sides, Thesis and Antithesis contradictions, try to control the players, nature, scope, depth and weapons used in the struggles between the Thesis and Antithesis, and voila, you and your inbred offspring not only retain and expand power in the new “Order”, you learn more and more about how to acquire and keep power and “extirpate” of the “inferior stock” and all those who would expose and challenge you.]

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The fulcrum for the policy of constructive chaos is, at present, the Middle East situation. Although U.S. military action in the region has for the time being subsided, America’s military power will remain a critical determinant in the future of that vital zone of conflict. American military power is aimed at securing undisputed control over the vast reservoir of oil — not at necessarily fostering any permanent alignment of local states or combinations of regional interests.

If President George Bush and his fellow true believers are successful, the United States will be first among equals in the New World Order. This is their goal. It is also the quest of the Bonesmen of the Order of Skull & Bones — America’s warrior aristocracy.

THE ORDER OF SKULL & BONES

Skull & Bones was founded at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut in 1832. It is the oldest and most prestigious of Yale’s seven secret societies. Among the others are: Scroll & Key, Book & Snake, Wolf’s Head, Eliahu, and Berzelius. These fraternities serve as a recruiting ground for young men destined for careers in government, law, finance and other influential sectors of American life. Skull & Bones is the elite of the elite among these secret societies. Only Scroll & Key can claim a near equal influence on American affairs over the past 160 years.

Unlike the Greek fraternities on most other American university campuses, Skull & Bones and its similar secret societies exist exclusively at Yale. They are not part of any nationwide public association. The other elite Ivy League colleges, Harvard and Princeton have similar exclusive secret societies. Yet, even among these few universities, the secret societies of Yale — led by Skull & Bones — are unchallenged in their influence on American political affairs.

According to some accounts, the Skull & Bones secret society at Yale has an underground affiliation with two other societies which were simultaneously founded at two other locations. The number “322” that appears under the skull and crossbones on the Order’s emblem is believed to indicate the year of its founding — 1832 — and the fact that it is the second lodge within an international system. By some accounts, the lodge holding the number “1” is in Germany and the lodge numbered “3” is based at another American college.

Since its founding, Skull & Bones has only inducted about 2,500 members. At any given time, only about 600 or so members of the Order are alive. This small number underscores the tremendous concentration of power in the hands of its members.

If the members of Skull & Bones were to select a Hall of Fame from among their own elite ranks, some of the people whose names would almost certainly appear at the top of the list would be:

Many of the secret Skull and Bones rituals and symbols, like the Mormons, come from Masonry. Both GHW and GW Bush deny membership in the Masons. Why?

* Alphonso Taft, a founding member of the Order who served as the Secretary of War under President Rutherford B. Hayes (1876-1880).

* William Howard Taft, the only man to ever serve as both the President of and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

* Henry Lewis Stimson, partner in the Wall Street law firm of Root and Stimson, Secretary of War under President Taft (1908-1912), Governor General of the Philippines (1926-1928), Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) and Secretary of War under Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (1940-1946).

* Averell Harriman, investment banker with Brown Brothers Harriman, director of the Lend-Lease program of the U.S. State Department (1941-1942), U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1943-1946), Governor of New York, Under Secretary of State for Asia (1961-1963), and presidential secret envoy to Soviet leaders Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov.

* Robert Lovett, partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, Assistant Secretary of War for Air (1941-1945), Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Defense (1950), leading member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.

* Harold Stanley, investment banker, founder of Morgan Stanley.

* Robert A. Taft, United States Senator (1938-1950).

* Prescott Bush, investment banker and partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, United States Senator from Connecticut, father of George Herbert Walker Bush

* George Herbert Walker Bush, United States Congressman (1964-1970), Chairman of the Republican National Committee, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, first American Diplomatic Liaison to the Peoples Republic of China, Director of the Central Intelligence Ageney (1975-1977). Vice President of the United States (1980-1988), President of the United States (1988- ).

* Hugh Wilson, foreign service officer, Counselor to Japan (1911- 1921), U.S. Minister to Switzerland (1924-1927), Assistant Secretary of State (1937-1938). Ambassador to Germany 1938), Special Assistant to the Secretary of State (1939-1941), Office of Strategic Services (1941-1945)

Skull and Bones is a kind of Preppy KKK but their robes and hoods used to be black and not white. Inbred White Trash with or without a tie and a Yale degree are still White Trash.

The members of the Order of Skull & Bones, true to their firm belief in “constructive confusion,” have intentionally allowed a series of conflicting mythologies to spring up about the origins and history of their secret fraternity. According to one version of the Order’s founding, it was an outgrowth of an earlier British or Scottish freemasonic grouping first established at All Soul’s College at Oxford University in the late 17th century. Another version of the history of Skull & Bones is that it grew out of the German “nationalistic” secret .societies of the early 19th century. Still a third explanation is that Skull & Bones is an uniquely American institution which adopted some of the rituals of European freemasonry, but molded these rituals and beliefs into a new form.

Regardless of these conflicting accounts, it can be stated with certainty that the Order was first established on the Yale campus in 1832 It was officially incorporated only in 1856 under the name Russell Trust Association. According to virtually all the available biographical data on its early members, the money required to sustain the secret order’s campus affairs and its broader role in placing its members into key positions of influence upon their graduation from Yale, derived from the opium trade in the Far East. That trade was set up by the British East India Company and was flourishing by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 ending the American War for Independence. The East India Company during this period was controlled by the Baring Brothers Bank (Toward the closing decades of the 17th century, the British House of Rothschild would supplant the Baring Brothers as the controlling financial interests in the China opium trade.

Through the sponsorship of the Barings and also the Rothschilds, a number of leading New England families, some of whom had sided with Great Britain during the American Revolution, were brought into the opium trade as junior partners. These merchant families ran fleets of clipper ships and became in many cases fabulously wealthy as the result of their association with the British East India Company. Among these key New England merchant families were: Cabot, Coolidge, Forbes, Higginson, Sturgis, Lodge, Lowell, Perkins and Russell.

These New England merchant families founded the United Fruit Company and the Bank of Boston. The founding families of Skull & Bones included the Russell and Perkins families, Over several generations, however, all these families heavily intermarried and became, in effect, one extended power grouping.

Skull and Bones brag about Puritan origins and genetics as if it were some kind of accomplishment and credential they had something to do with.

William Huntington Russell incorporated Skull & Bones as the Russell Trust Association. Throughout the 20th century, the Russell Trust Association listed the New York City headquarters of Brown Brothers Harriman as its address.

Russell was valedictorian of his class at Yale in 1833. He and his Skull & Bones comrades considered themselves to be a special elite among the merchant banking and Puritan pilgrim elite of Yale. They took the Puritan beliefs of the early New England settlers, that they were “elected by God,” and pre-ordained to rule North America.

The founding of Yale College in 1701 pre-dates the American Revolution by several generations. Many of the founders of Yale were righteous men of the Puritan heritage who devoutly believed in God and country. Some of these patriotic souls later made up the core of Benjamin Franklin’s political coalition which ultimately broke with the mother country, Great Britain. Many graduates of Yale were active in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States.

Two critics of the Order, historian Antony Sutton and investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum (himself a Yale graduate), both concluded that Skull & Bones has degenerated since its founding and has taken on more of the occult and ritualistic trappings of the majority of European freemasonic and Illuminati secret societies. Sutton charges that the Order is secretly known among its initiates as the “Brotherhood of Death” and has become an evil instrument in the hands of America’s secret power elite. Rosenbaum claims that the society’s Germanic origins are inherently wicked and pre-Nazi.

Prescott Bush and Hitler who was financed by Bush, George Herbert Walker, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford from 1924 onward including throughout World War II . Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that this funding in 1924 was critical to the survival of the Nazi movement.

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In a long 1977 article in Esquire magazine, Rosenbaum charged that the Skull & Bones building on the Yale campus houses remnants from Hitler’s private collection of silver. While these stories cannot be dismissed out of hand, it must be noted that authors Rosenbaum and Sutton may be biased. As a young Jewish student at Yale, Rosenbaum was almost automatically excluded on religious grounds from the inner sanctum of the campus’s secret societies. Sutton, a British-born eccentric historian, proudly admits his strong British biases, frequently citing philosopher John Stuart Mill as the spiritual mentor in his book on the Order.

Despite the possible personal biases in these two accounts of the history of the Order of Skull & Bones, it must be acknowledged that the membership of the society has tended over generations to converge upon a small group of New England families who have intermarried and then sponsored their sons and nephews into the Order. This kind of inbreeding always tends to produce narrow-mindedness and prejudice against outsiders, which can be a serious shortcoming, particularly among individuals responsible for charting the course of a nation as powerful as the United States.

It can be documented by comparing the family charts of the early Bonesmen that there is today a core group of no more than 20 to 30 families who form the nucleus of the Order. The majority are old-line Puritan families who came to North America in the very first wave of settlers in the 17th century. Among these prominent families are: Whitney, Lord, Phelps. Wadsworth, Allen, Bundy, Adams, Stimson, Taft, Gilman and Perkins. A second group of families in the Skull & Bones core earned fabulous fortunes during the 18th and 19th centuries and thus won a rite of passage into the New England elite, even though they were not among the earliest settlers. The leading Skull & Bones families in this second category are: Harriman, Rockefeller, Payne, Davison, Pillsbury and Weyerhauser.

A few of the Jewish banking families who made their way from Germany to the United States during the 18th and l9th centuries were eventually granted limited access to the WASP inner sanctums. Some families, like the Schiff, Warburg, Guggenheim and Meyer families, were unofficially designated as intermediaries between the New England WASPs and their cousins in London. This was especially true after the Rothschild interests supplanted the Anglican Baring group as the most powerful financial cabal in the City of London. Some of these German Jewish families became so absorbed into the WASP or Anglican society that they eventually converted from Judaism to Protestantism and were gradually ostracized from the Jewish aristocracy.

The WASP families, however, never saw the prominent Jewish investment banking families of America as equals. The Jews were considered politically and culturally different by the WASPs, and have never been accepted into the latter’s inner circle. For the most part, these Jewish merchant bankers are viewed with suspicion and distrust by the members of the Order. Moreover, the Jewish fraternal societies, such as B’nai B’rith, were formed out of the British-based Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Their sponsors in America, the Rothschilds and the Cecil Rhodes Trust (also known as the British Round Table Group), are connected with the British Foreign Office and its secret intelligence apparatus.

Jan. 10,1914 Anglo-American-German Conference on Eugenics and like many others. in attendance many Bonesmen as well as future Nazis like Joseph Mengele, and Alfred Rosenberg and the proto-Nazi Thule Society

INITIATION AND RITUAL

To be initiated into the Order of Skull & Bones, one must endure a ritual of selection called “tapping”. It is conducted by 15 senior classmen of Yale University who make up the current membership of the secret society. They select 15 members of the junior class to be the Bonesmen the following year. Historically, Skull & Bones kept blacks, Jews and all other non-WASPs from its ranks. Within the last 30 years, however, token members from these groups have been occasionally selected to join. Thus, in the most recent list of initiates to the Order, there is one Yalie with a Jewish surname and even one with a Chinese name. According to author Rosenbaum, in recent years, the Order has inducted members of homosexual rights groups on the campus into its ranks.

Among the criterion for selection — apart from family ties to the order, which has always been an important factor — is what is referred to by historians and members as the “Three Ordeals.” These ordeals are intended to measure the prospective Bonesman’s ability to “make it” in the world beyond the university campus.

The first ordeal is boarding school. The overwhelming majority of Bonesmen, given their wealthy blueblood family pedigrees, attend one of the prestigious New England preparatory schools, i.e, private high schools. (Whereas a large number of the most elite of the Harvard University students attend Groton, a school with close ties to the Anglican-Episcopal Church, where they receive a thoroughly Anglophilic education, the preferred prep schools for the future Bonesmen are the two Puritan Calvinist-sponsored Phillips Academies.)

The second of the ordeals is that of nature. The prospective Bonesmen are judged on their skills as outdoorsmen. Hunting in the New England countryside or, better yet, traveling to distant locations like Africa, the jungles of South America or even the American badlands of the Plains states, is a prerequisite for admission to the Spartan elite ranks of the Order.

The third of the ordeals is war. The experience of combat during wartime is considered to be of special significance for the Bonesmen, who see themselves as the elite of the New England WASP warrior caste. Many Yale Bonesmen of President George Bush’s generation, as the result of the outbreak of World War II, went directly from prep school into the military service prior to their entering Yale. For a majority of Bonesmen, the preferred military service has historically been with the U.S. Navy. During World II the Naval air corp was a particularly important track for future Bones initiates. In peacetime, participation at Yale in military officer’s training is desirable but not essential. The commitment to enter some branch of the military upon graduation is viewed with favor.

After the formal selection of the next group of prospective Bonesmen, there is an invitation followed by a formal initiation ceremony. First the 15 senior class members who are the members of the Order select a group of junior class members who are to be “tapped” for Skull & Bones. A group of Bonesmen proceed to the dormitory room of the “tappee.” Upon reaching the door, they pound loudly. When the prospective member opens the door, a Bonesman will tap him on the shoulder and yell, “Skull and Bones: Do you accept?” If the candidate accepts, a message wrapped with a black ribbon sealed by black wax with the skull and crossbones emblem and the mystical Bones number 322 is handed to the “tappee.” The message appoints a time and a place for the candidate to appear on initiation night. Candidates are instructed to wear no metal objects or clothing.

According to a 1940 Skull & Bones document, the initiation ceremony involves the following kinds of things: “New man placed in coffin — carried into central part of building. New man chanted over and reborn into society. Removed from coffin and given robes with symbols on it. A bone with his name on it is tossed into the bone heap at the start of every meeting.”

Within the Skull & Bones Crypt, also known as “the Tomb,” there is what is referred to as a “sacred room” with the number 322, On the arched wall about the vault entrance is inscribed in German: “Who was the fool, who was the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all’s the same in death.”

This quotation from a German Freemasonic ritual remains a source of controversy surrounding the origins of Skull & Bones. It is one of the bits of “evidence” cited by some of the Order’s most ardent critics that the group is “Nazi like” and singularly “Germanic”. In fact, the rituals of the Order are very much like the rituals employed by Scottish and English freemasonic lodges.

Some of the mystery and confusion surrounding these occult symbols and rituals is intentionally fostered by the Order itself. Among the principles taught to the members of the Yale secret society are the value of ambiguity and secrecy. These values are not taught as part of a purely mystical or occult quasi-religion. They are taught as valuable tools to be applied by the Bonesmen when they leave the insulated environment of the Yale campus and become officials of government, the intelligence community, the military or the private sector.

A careful study of the often confusing and self-contradictory behavior and public statements of President Bush and his closest advisers throughout the months of the Persian Gulf crisis of last year and war that followed offers a valuable example of how ambiguity and secrecy are applied by Bonesmen.

For the initiates of the Order, the question of whether secrecy and ambiguity are used for the purpose of accomplishing “good” or “evil” is of secondary importance. Secrecy and ambiguity are essential instruments for wielding power. The effective wielding of power is one of the overarching goals of all Bonesmen. The secret ties built up during the Bonesmen’s senior year of active membership in the Order are maintained for life. Those ties link each Bonesman to every other initiate, especially to those initiates who were members of the Order in the same year.

[ STTPML: Generally all secret cults use hazing, “revealing sessions”, tests of fidelity, informing on each other, oaths taken to trump all other oaths taken or to be taken is for criminal conduct to demonstrate bona fides and commitment, etc four basic reasons: 1) That which is easily obtained is typically not valued, and that which is made difficult to attain not only creates some kind of new status when attained, but also sets-up cognitive dissonance in that it is harder and harder to repudiate what one once put so much into to attain; 2) blackmail material in case the new initiate or later “Knight of Eulogia” might stray or just wake up to what kind of Faustian Bargain he or she has made and for what really; cults and ongoing conspiracies are as strong as their weakest links; 3) tests of commitment, vetting, weaknesses, strengths, leaders and followers, skeletons (not only what are there but what might prevent attaining and holding power); 4) ongoing socialization, bonding, monitoring and preparation for further training, conditioning, schmoozing, dressing for success, networking, “grooming” for placement into some power niche.]

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Thus, every member of Skull & Bones is, in real and practical terms, part of a small elite group of young Yale graduates — most from wealthy and powerful WASP families — who enter the world of politics, business, finance, intelligence or education and who proceed to make their mark on the world.

According to several sources, President George Bush to this day frequently consults with several of his fellow Yale Bonesmen, and has, on occasion, called upon Skull & Bones members to carry out secret diplomatic missions for the White House.

THE SPARTAN MODEL

These rites of passage into the upper ranks of the WASP Establishment are capped by the experience the Bonesmen go through in their final year at Yale — the year in which they actively participate in the Order. For the vast majority of the initiates, the process of inculcation with the ideas of WASP supremacy, an American Calvinist version of what British imperialist writer Rudyard Kipling called the “White Man’s Burden,” began at prep school.

According to the biographical accounts of a number of the leading Bonesmen, the prep school experience is paramount. At prep school, intellectual pursuits are encouraged, but special emphasis is also placed on athletic performance. Future Yale Bonesmen are expected to excel in some team sport, such as baseball and football, both American inventions. (Members of Skull & Bones were involved in the development of both games.) Team sports supposedly prepare the future Bonesman to accept leadership responsibility, and more importantly, teach him to “respect the rules of the game.”

According to one biographer, when George Bush was a Yale undergraduate he was a member of the university baseball team. Although he was apparently not a very good baseball player, he eventually became captain of the Yale team. One day during the Yale baseball season, he excitedly visited his mother to proudly proclaim that he had hit his first home run. She reportedly looked back at him with patrician coolness, and asked, “Yes, George, but did your team win the game?”

The particular emphasis on team sports during the prep school and Yale years is, according to several historians, part of the Spartan training that is so essential to the Skull & Bones philosophy. In the world of Skull & Bones, one of the greatest virtues is the ability to steer the nation into war and to successfully prosecute the war.

To the Bonesmen, the use of military power is a natural and essential corollary to political power. The Bonesmen are taught that, although ideas have their place, to truly transform history, military force is almost always required. Critics of the Order have pointed out that this philosophy of power and the imperial use of military force comes straight from the chronicles of the Roman Empire — especially the Roman Empire during its phase of decline and collapse.

The criticism may prove to be most prophetically true of the current generation of Bonesmen who are leading the United States under the presidency of George Bush. During the final phase of the Roman Empire, legions were deployed out around the world to conquer and subjugate vast territories, while back in Rome, there was a breakdown, a crisis in which the entire social and cultural fabric of the early Roman republic was eroding and giving way to something akin to the drug, rock-sex counterculture of today. The Roman imperial policy of attempting to gloss over the decadence at home by engaging in constant wars of expansion led ultimately to the total collapse of Rome.

How many “blowbacks”, misery and carnage from this one Bush Dynasty and this one twisted little cult?

In this regard, the Spartan-Roman imperial outlook of the American WASP warrior caste, exemplified by Skull & Bones, cannot be precisely compared to the Japanese samurai code of Bushido. The Japanese Bushido code emphasized honor among the warriors and presumed a fundamentally moral or ethical vision of the world.

No such emphasis on morality and honor exists in the code of Skull & Bones. On the contrary, the Skull & Bones philosophy, according to several of its most astute critics and historians, emphasizes the “double-cross system.” The “double-cross” is symbolically represented by the crossbones on the emblem of the Order. According to this philosophy, anyone who is not an initiate is inferior, and can be lied to and manipulated to further the power of the WASP Establishment. To the extent that Japanese leaders view their American WASP counterparts as men of honor whose word is sacred and whose intentions are presumed to be virtuous, they will miss the fundamental character of the American imperium. This is of special importance today, with a leading member of the Skull & Bones system occupying the White House.

[STTPML: Some of us in STTPML held high-level security clearances while in the military and in government service. We were all asked if we were communists or had any associations with communists, but we were never asked if we were fascists or had any connections with fascist parties or movements. We were also never asked if we belonged to any organization that required an oath of fealty and secrecy that was taken to trump any other oaths taken including the oath to uphold, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. But if we were asked a question that an oath to a secret society prohibited answering, we cannot imagine answering with something like: “Well, sir, you see, you are a barbarian, not part of my cult that I took a solemn oath to protect the secrets of, and that oath is the most binding I have taken or will ever take, so I refuse to answer your questions, or, if I do, I hope you understand that I also took an oath to deceive barbarians, so I am going to have to lie.” How would that play? So why are any of these persons, including also Masons, Mormons, Opus Dei, given security clearances and public employment if “National Security” and full vetting for security risks is so paramount?]

White Paper Continues;

Skull & Bones philosophy first manifested itself at the American national political level in the late l9th century. At that time, the men of the Order adopted all the critical features of the British imperial system, especially the belief in the Anglo Saxon God-given right to rule over all the other races. Even countries like Japan, which were never colonial possessions of the Anglo-American combination, were viewed as inferior nations to be treated no differently from the colonies in Africa, India or Latin America.

In 1898, President William McKinley, one of the last of the American presidents to manifest any of the early republican (anti-British imperialism) traditions of the Founding Fathers, was under enormous pressure from the Skull & Bones-led American imperialists. Eventually, he went to war against Spain to “free” Cuba and seize the Philippines. This was the first time that the United States entered a war through devious manipulation and purely in order to expand its territories. It marked the beginning of a new epoch in American history which would forever alter the vision of the United States. It was the first evidence that the men of the Order were at the helm of the ship of state.

President McKinley’s capitulation to the WASP warriors would prove to be fatal to himself and, some would say, for his country, too. The Spanish-American War of 1898 catapulted the Skull & Bones crowd into a position of dominance within the Republican Party. At the 1900 party presidential nominating convention, McKinley was forced to accept Teddy Roosevelt as his vice presidential running mate. The McKinley-Roosevelt slate was swept into office, in part as the result of the jingoist climate built up by the just-concluded Spanish-American War. Those circumstances were not all that different from the mood that prevails in America in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991.

Any politician today that would openly proclaim the kind of vile anti-Semitism, racism, war mongering, white supremacy and naked imperialism that Roosevelt openly advocated would be driven out even by his own kind as too naked.

Within months of his inauguration of 1901, President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist while traveling through Buffalo, New York. Thus, Teddy Roosevelt became president, and the Order of Skull & Bones for the first time moved into the White House. Roosevelt surrounded himself with Bonesmen. His successor in 1908, William Howard Taft, was himself a second generation member of Skull & Bones.

According to a January 1991 article by the Washington syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, when President George Bush was making his final decision to use military force to crush Saddam Hussein and decimate Iraq, he spent most of the Christmas holidays closeted at Camp David reading a newly published biography of one of his true heroes, fellow Skull & Bones initiate Henry Stimson. While most White House advisers thought that the gulf crisis would be ultimately resolved through diplomacy, unbeknownst to them, President Bush had already decided on the use of devastating military force — regardless of what measures the world community or the Iraqi leaders took to avert war. Intimate Bush advisers described the president as being in a “mesmerized” state of mind as he walked around the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains with his Stimson biography, “The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson,” under his arm at all times.

Indeed, for most contemporary Bonesmen, Henry Lewis Stimson, the quintessential WASP warrior, was the very personification of the Order’s full ascent to power during the period of World War II.

A member of the Order’s class of 1888, Stimson served seven U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft (a fellow Bonesman), Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. As the Secretary of War under FDR and Truman, Stimson oversaw the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Stimson personally decided on the use of that devastating weapon against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Years earlier, as the chairman of the American delegation at the London Naval Conference and as Secretary of State under President Hoover (1929-1933), Stimson had played a pivotal role in restricting the size of the Japanese Imperial Navy. He would be an architect of the FDR ‘s administration’s economic provocations against Japan which ultimately helped induce Japan into the attack at Pearl Harbor, thus bringing the United States formally into World War II. And Stimson was also ultimately responsible for the FDR administration’s decision to intern the Nisei (Japanese-Americans) after Pearl Harbor.

Yet, it was also Stimson who ordered American bombers to refrain from attacking the old Japanese imperial capital of Kyoto, a city rich in religious and historical tradition and artifacts. And, according to at least one of Stimson’s biographers, it was also “the Colonel” who decided at the close of the war that the Japanese emperor should not be deposed. His sensitivity to Japanese culture and the importance of allowing Japan to retain honor even in defeat is widely to his close adviser, Joseph Grew, a longtime U.S. ambassador to Japan and an accomplished historian. Whether this report of Stimson’s involvement in the decision to maintain the emperor is accurate or whether it underplays the role of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the fact remains certain that Stimson was the key policymaker overseeing the postwar occupations of both Japan and Germany.

To fully understand President George Bush’s attitudes and policies toward Japan, one must first appreciate the overarching influence that Stimson had on the current occupant of the White House.

According to his British biographer Geofrey Hodgson, Stimson’s membership in Skull & Bones was “the most important educational experience in his life.” Unlike most of his fellow Bonesmen, Stimson earned his membership solely on the basis of his achievements at Yale — not through family money. His parents were not wealthy, although his forefathers did come to America as early Puritan colonists. But Stimson made up for his lack of financial credentials by his fierce competitive spirit. As he himself put it, the “idea of a struggle for prizes, so to speak, has always been one of the fundamental elements of my mind, and I can hardly conceive of what my feelings would be if I ever was put in a position or situation in life where there are no prizes to struggle for.”

Although Stimson did not come from classic blueblood background, he married into wealth and power. His wife, Mabel White, came from a prominent Establishment family with longstanding ties to the Order. Thus, upon graduation from law school, Stimson became a partner in the law firm of Eliahu Root, President Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of War.

Although Stimson and Roosevelt would have a falling out in later years, early on Roosevelt and Root provided “the Colonel” with the critical sponsorship and training required to succeed in the world of Establishment politics. According to Stimson’s biographers, Roosevelt would frequently taunt the young Bonesman about the fact that he, unlike the president, had never been in the military or fought in any wars. (Roosevelt had resigned as Under Secretary of the Navy to go off and fight in the Spanish-American War.) Thus, at the ripe old age of 44, Stimson joined the Army during World War I and served in the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.

Among the other lasting interests that Roosevelt would pass on to Stimson was his deep passion for the Pacific. Roosevelt was convinced that America’s imperial destiny was dependent upon its domination of the Pacific Ocean and the Far East. The Spanish-American War, which marked the beginning of America’s imperial phase — and the virtual abandonment of the republican principles upon which the nation had been founded — began the U.S. colonial occupation of the Philippines, which would continue through half of the next century. Ultimately, Stimson would himself serve as the American Governor General of the islands.

In 1900, Roosevelt wrote to Stimson: “Our people are neither craven nor weaklings, as we face the future high of heart and confident of soul, eager to do the great work of a great power… wish to see the United States the dominant power on the Pacific Ocean.”

STIMSON’S KINDERGARTEN AND THE COLD WAR

Henry Stimson’s towering influence on George Bush and many other current members and like-thinking allies of the Order was based not only on “the Colonel’s” lifetime of achievements. It was also rooted in the fact that Stimson used the World War II period to groom a successor generation of young WASP warriors who would dominate American policymaking during the Cold War and beyond. Although not every member of what came to be known as the “Stimson’s Kindergarten” was a member of Skull & Bones, or even a Yale graduate, many were. All were inculcated with the Skull & Bones philosophy and methodology of wielding power. It is through this alliance and patronage system that the influence of the Order has been extended far beyond its small membership roster.

Among the leading members of the “Stimson Kindergarten” were:

* John J. McCloy, who was Assistant Secretary of War and later served as the High Commissioner for Germany during the postwar occupation.

* Robert Lovett, a member of Skull & Bones and a partner in the Order’s preeminent Wall Street investment house Brown Brothers Harriman. He became Stimson’s Assistant Secretary of War (Air Section). Lovett remained an influential policymaker through the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

* Harvey Bundy, another Bonesman, who became Stimson’s special assistant at the War Department. Harvey Bundy’s two sons, McGeorge and William, fresh out of Yale University and Skull & Bones, joined their father on Stimson’s personal staff. McGeorge Bundy would co-author Stimson’s memoirs In Active Service in Peace and War.

* Dean Acheson, Assistant Secretary of State, Yale graduate (he was not a member of the Order, but, rather, of one of the other Yale secret societies, Scroll Key) and senior policy adviser to FDR and Truman, who ultimately made him Secretary of State.

* Gen. George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the armed forces during World War II and later Truman’s Secretary of State.

This group of high-powered policymakers of World War II and immediate post war period were known as the “Stimson-Marshall-Acheson Circle.” They shaped America’s Cold War containment policy against the Soviet Union and Communist China, including the involvement of the United States in the Korean War. It was also this group which, for better or worse, directed the postwar reconstruction programs in Germany and Japan.

Another influential member of Skull & Bones, Averell Harriman, was personally responsible for the sacking of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It was Harriman, a banker, intriguer and former American Ambassador to Moscow, who convinced President Truman to fire MacArthur.

The predominant role that Averell Harriman would play over the course of 40 years of postwar American policymaking underscores the fact that not all leading members of Skull & Bones share the identical policy outlook. While some members of the Stimson inner circle were critical of Harriman, whom they considered to be too personally ambitious (he was also a liberal imperial Democrat in a secret fraternity dominated historically by moderate Republicans), Harriman nevertheless stands out as one of the Order’s most active figures. The fact that he was a business partner and social intimate throughout his adult life of fellow Bonesman and Republican Sen. Prescott Bush Sr., the father of the current president underscores that point.

Henry Stimson died in 1950, leaving behind a core group of political offspring led by members of his old secret society, Skull & Bones. In the final years of his life he was involved in helping to shape a number of postwar government agencies which would become bastions of power and influence for the Order for years to come. Through this active role in shaping the key institutions of the Cold War era, Stimson was able to establish a continuity of power that would more than compensate for the fact that no single figure among his “kindergarten” emerged as a clear successor, and that several, like McGeorge Bundy, would prove ultimately to be rather disappointing students.

The National Security Act of 1947 transformed Stimson’s old War Department into the Department of Defense, a sprawling civilian bureaucracy which would in future years house many of the most important members of the Order. Robert Lovett, for example, would become the Secretary of Defense in 1950. The 1947 act also established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the permanent successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In the early 1950s, the State Department’s Office of Policy Coordination was merged into the CIA, giving the secret agency total control of America’s clandestine operations. The National Security Agency (NSA) also was established, under the direction of the Department of Defense, vastly expanding America’s signal intelligence capability.

Of all these agencies of the Cold War era, the CIA would stand out as a singular power center for Yale University alumni in general and Skull & Bones initiates in particular. The term “spooks,” the well-known CIA term for a clandestine operator, was originally Yale campus argot for a secret society member. According to a recently published article in the Covert Action Information Bulletin, there is reportedly a “Bones club” within the CIA which helps promote the intelligence careers of members of the Yale secret society.

It should be pointed out that bureaucratic standing is not a real measure of power within the CIA. Very often, individuals in relatively insignificant positions within the organizational chart wield tremendous clout and maintain access to the most sensitive information and policy. Thus, for example, the present U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, James Lilley, a member of Skull & Bones and a career CIA man, is being suggested to replace William Webster as Director of Central Intelligence. For Lilley to step in as director of CIA would at this moment represent a demotion for the senior field operator. It is, however, a demotion he might accept as a personal favor to fellow Bonesman and longtime intimate pal George Bush.

The predominance of Yale graduates inside the CIA is also a part of the Stimson legacy. During World War II, many Yale students and even several leading faculty members entered the OSS. The X-2 Branch of OSS, the counterintelligence unit, was dominated by Yale students, as well as Yale English Literature professor Norman Holmes Pearson. One of the Yale men in X-2, James Jesus Angleton, went on to a legendary career as director of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff.

Yale Skull & Bonesman and Stimson “Kindergartener” William Bundy assumed a senior post at CIA during the 1950s, as did Yale graduates Richard Bissell and Cord Meyer and Yale professor Sherman Kent.

VIETNAM: THE BONESMEN’S DEBACLE

According to author David Halberstam’s best-selling critique of the Kennedy years, “The Best and the Brightest,” the JFK presidency marked the high point of Skull & Bones postwar power. But it also marked the beginning of the secret fraternity’s fall from the position of unchallenged power, and the beginning of America’s precipitous decline as a world power. All these factors are summed up in one word: Vietnam.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Cabinet was largely handpicked by Skull & Bones elder statesman Robert Lovett, who was personally approached by Joseph Kennedy, the president’s father, and asked to shape the direction of the new administration. Lovett had been one of the architects of the World War II industrial mobilization under President Franklin Roosevelt, which helped bring the United States out of the Great Depression. He had been a factional opponent of Averell Harriman within the Skull & Bones circles, initially opposing the Cold War containment doctrine and pushing the idea of Atoms for Peace during the early years of the Eisenhower presidency (l952-1960).

Kennedy had personally asked Lovett to join his Cabinet, but Lovett, a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, preferred to shun formal government service. Instead, he placed a number of younger Bonesmen into the critical posts. McGeorge Bundy was appointed Kennedy’s National Security Adviser. Averell Harriman was made Under Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, a position that placed him in charge of many of the most critical decisions along the way to disaster in Vietnam. William Bundy remained in a senior post at CIA.

The decision to escalate the American military involvement in Vietnam — a rejection of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s prophetic warning that the United States should never engage in a ground war in Asia — was made by members of the Order. According to some accounts, President Kennedy began to have serious second thoughts about escalating the war, particularly after several private Oval Office discussions with MacArthur.

With Kennedy’s assassination, American soldiers began pouring into Southeast Asia. Harriman remained a fixture of Vietnam policy under President Lyndon Baines Johnson. McGeorge Bundy remained on as LBJ’s National Security Adviser untill , when he left government service to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation, the largest tax-exempt philanthropic agency in the United States. The Ford Foundation annually dispenses of nearly $3 billion in grants.

In his capacity as president of the Ford Foundation, Bundy helped finance the anti-Vietnam War movement. The National Student Mobilization Committee, the umbrella group for the entire New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s, was led by David Dellinger, a Yale graduate. Episcopal Church activist William Sloan Coffin, a Bonesman, a second leading figure in the anti-war protest movement, had previously served as a CIA officer.

Thus, the Order had its hands in two critical elements of the policy debacle of the second half of the 1960s. Some leading Bonesmen helped shape the disastrous limited war strategy in Vietnam, while other members of the Order, at least tacitly, contributed to the growth of the drug-rock-sex counterculture by nourishing the New Left soil from which it sprang.

As a result of the Vietnam debacle, the “Stimson Kindergarten” literally drove itself out of the corridors of power which it had occupied without challenge for the previous 20 years. With the election of Richard Nixon as president of the United States in November 1968, a different team came into prominence. The politics of that team were personified by Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Adviser and Secretary of State.

In a May 1982 speech in London at the Chatham House headquarters of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Kissinger boasted that he was an enthusiastic follower of the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and that throughout his years in senior government posts under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford (1974-1976), he had always consulted more frequently with his counterparts in the British Foreign Office than he had with officials of his own government.

Although Kissinger had enjoyed early patronage from McGeorge Bundy, when the Bonesman was Dean of Harvard University and Kennedy’s NSC adviser, the Kissinger era marked a low point in Skull & Bones’ government power. The Central Intelligence Agency, a hub of the Order’s clout, was decimated by scandals that only compounded the damage done to the Agency as the result of its role in the Vietnam disaster.

According to some respected writers, for example, Jim Hougan, author of “Secret Agenda,” the CIA attempted to reverse the route by helping to bring down Richard Nixon in Watergate. There is significant evidence to bolster some of these accounts.

When Gerald Ford became president in August 1974 following Nixon’s resignation, Skull & Bones made a brief comeback. In what came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Ford, in the autumn of 1975, removed Henry Kissinger from his post as NSC Adviser, replacing him with Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Kissinger ally James Schlesinger was fired as Secretary of Defense and replaced by Donald Rumsfeld. And CIA Director William Colby, who had dueled with Angleton, was fired and replaced by Skull & Bones member George Bush.

If these maneuvers were intended to be the first step in a more ambitious comeback by the WASP warrior faction, the plan was short-circuited with the election in November 1976 of Jimmy Carter as president. It would really not be until the inauguration of George Bush as president in January 1989 — a dozen years later — that Skull & Bones would resurface with the same degree of governmental power that it had enjoyed during the Stimson years. George Bush’s selection as Ronald Reagan’s vice presidential running mate in the 1980 and 1984 elections was the transition back to that power.

Many things had gone wrong in the years since Vietnam to drive the Bonesmen off the center stage. With more than a little input from Bonesmen like McGeorge Bundy and Averell Harriman, the United States had gone into a period of scientific, technological and industrial retreat. The Nixon decision on August 15, 1971 to remove the dollar from a fixed, gold-backed exchange rate system, had triggered a move toward double-digit inflation, urban decay, rising unemployment and soaring interest rates. The Kissinger-orchestrated Iranian-Middle East oil crisis in the early 1970s had contributed to a rate of deindustrialization that ultimately transformed the United State from the biggest creditor nation in the world to the world’s biggest debtor nation. According to estimates compiled around the time of George Bush’s inauguration as president, the total U.S. internal indebtedness had skyrocketed to more than $12 trillion.

Moreover, the period of the 1970s and 1980s had given rise to a new and powerful political-financial combination demanding a share of government clout. This new grouping, with its principle power bases in the U.S. Congress, in Hollywood and on Wall Street, was known as the Zionist lobby.

Although Jewish names had been prominent in the legal profession and on Wall Street since the founding of the American republic, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors, Zionist power took on a whole different proportion. Again, Henry Kissinger’s position in the Nixon administration symbolized the fact that the pro-Israel lobby had moved in with a vengeance to the corridors of power in the nation’s capital. Even on Wall Street the 1970s and 1980s had seen a new generation of Jewish financiers come into power, replacing their more cultured and Anglicized predecessors. The WASP Establishment had developed a tolerance of and working relationship with the largely German Jewish bankers known among themselves as “Our Crowd.” The new upstart Wall Street Zionists, however, were viewed by the WASPs as a collection of gangsters.

If the Skull & Bonesmen needed a legitimate justification for reviving their ever-present dislike of the East European Ashkenazic Jews, the Wall Street Zionists who became known as the so-called “New Crowd” provided them with all the excuses necessary. When Jonathan Jay Pollard, a Naval intelligence analyst, was arrested in November 1985 and charged with spying for Israel against the United States, there was a resurgence of more unabashed antisemitism among the Bonesmen and their blueblood upperclass mates. It has since become a hallmark of the Bush White House. Even when practical political affairs have demanded that the Bush administration deal with the American Zionist lobby or the right-wing Shamir government of Israel, there has been a distinctive undertone of distrust bordering on overt hostility.

BUSH IN PROFILE

Unlike Averell Harriman, who reportedly coveted personal political power and drew sharp criticism from some of his fellow Bonesmen, George Bush has been a long-term “project” of Skull & Bones. The Bush presidency in real and symbolic terms represents the effort by the Order to restore the lost spirit of the WASP warrior Henry Stimson. With the passage of time and the decay of the WASP elite, the Bush presidency may yet prove to be a tragic replay of past American dreams.

George Bush’s career was sponsored every step of the way by Skull & Bones members, mostly of his father’s generation. Prescott Bush (Skull & Bones Class of 1917), a Brown Brothers Harriman partner who would serve one term in Congress as senator from Connecticut, sent George to the traditional private preparatory school, Phillips Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, which grooms young New England squires for later studies at Yale.

It was while finishing his prep school training at Andover that Bush was first exposed to Henry Stimson. Reportedly, Stimson delivered a stirring patriotic speech to the Phillips student body in l940 arguing forcefully for American intervention in the war in Europe. Ironically, at that very moment on the Yale campus, the majority of Skull & Bonesmen were leading the America First movement, which opposed any such U.S. entanglement in Europe.

When war with Japan broke out a year later, George Bush enlisted in the Navy and was trained as a pilot. He flew more than 50 missions before being shot down in the Pacific. At Yale after the war, Bush captained the baseball team and followed his father’s footsteps into the Order.

Political legends have it that George Bush shunned his family’s patronage and went off on his own to launch a business career as an oil wildcatter, or speculator, in Texas. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bush moved to Texas to work for Dresser Industries selling oil drilling equipment. The job was arranged for him by his father with Dresser president Neil Mallon, who was a fellow member of Skull & Bones. Desser, according to several sources, had close ties with the CIA.

After a few years with Dresser, George Bush set up his own company, Zapata Oil, to explore new oil fields in Texas and Mexico. Again, Bush was heavily backed by member of his family. Uncle George Herbert Walker, also a Skull & Bonesman, put up a large amount of capital, as did Brown Brothers Harriman. Lazard Brothers, a Jewish brokerage house with longstanding friendly ties to the New England WASPs, put up some money as well, at the urging of Andre Meyer, the owner of the Washington Post Corporation and the father of the current Post publisher Kathanne Graham. Zapata Oil sunk the first offshore well for the Kuwaiti government.

Even with that kind of backing, George Bush was less than a success as a businessman. In 1964, a longtime Bush friend, William Farrish III of Scotland, bought the majority of shares in Zapata for $3.2 million to keep the business afloat, while George, in a major career shift, ran for U.S. Congress from a wealthy district in Houston, Texas. He won.

During his three terms in Congress (Bush lost the 1970 Senate race to Lloyd Bentsen), George Bush distinguished himself as an advocate of zero population growth and a defender of the eugenics movement. Both of these positions, radical for their day, were probably the result of Bush’s close friendship with William Draper Jr. — a fellow Bonesman and a longtime advocate of population reduction schemes in the Third World.

The 1970s were for George Bush years of grooming in high-level politics and foreign policy. During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972, George Bush was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. He later joined the chorus calling for Nixon’s resignation. After a tour as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Bush was sent off to Communist China as the Chief Liaison Officer prior to the formalization of diplomatic relations. Bush shared the Beijing experience with Winston Lord, a fellow Skull & Bones member who was the CIA station chief. Lord went on to become president of the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1983. (The Lord family founded the city of Hartford, Connecticut, has a large number of Skull & Bones members on its family tree, and set up one of the most powerful old-line Wall Street law firms, Lord Day Lord.) In 1975, George Bush completed his “grooming” with a brief stint as Gerald Ford’s CIA director.

In 1980, Bush ran a short-lived campaign against Ronald Reagan for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Future running mate Reagan cut short Bush’s 1980 presidential hopes by defeating him soundly in the primary election in New Hampshire, in the heart of New England. Reagan blasted Bush for his membership in the internationalist Trilateral Commission, which had attained notoriety because 20 members of the unpopular Carter administration had served on the commission. Bush’s campaign was otherwise noteworthy because a significant number of his campaign volunteers were CIA officials; his campaign organization was directed by six top Agency and Pentagon retirees.

THE ORDER’S NETWORK

With Bush in the White House, the WASP Establishment is seeking to re-conquer lost territory, not only within the domain of national politics, but within the financial community, the legal profession and big business. A struggle between some elements of the WASP crowd and the Jewish “New Crowd” on Wall Street has been playing out in the newspapers and federal courts for the past six years, beginning with the criminal indictments of junk bond dealers Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and the bankrupting and criminal prosecuting of the powerful Zionist-run brokerage house Drexel Rurnham Lambert.

To some extent these wars reflect the kind of scramble that always takes place during a financial crisis and shakeout, when certain formerly powerful financial institutions are wiped out and others profit from their rivals’ adversity. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the House of Morgan came out on top. Not coincidentally, Morgan Guaranty Trust and Morgan Stanley have been cornerstones of the Skull & Bones grouping on Wall Street since their founding during the last century. Founding partner Harold Stanley was a Bonesman.

One hub of the Order’s postwar economic power, the major multinational oil corporations, have clearly benefited greatly from President Bush’s “charming little colonial war” in the Persian Gulf. The leading oil companies which are linked to the Order are: Standard Oil Trust Corporation, Shell Oil of America, Creole Petroleum Corporation and Pennzoil Corporation. The founder and present chairman of the board of Pennzoil started out in the oil business in partnership with George Bush in Zapata Oil. It is interesting to note in the context of the Bonesmen’s deep involvement in the world petroleum business that George Bush, during his early days as a Texas oilman, had worked closely with the Kuwaitis.

Eight major Wall Street and Washington, D.C. law firms stand out as practically wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Order of Skull & Bones. Each of these firms was founded by members of the Order, and each of these firms continues to provide up-and-coming Order initiates in the legal community with training, credentials and connections. A review of the major corporate clients of these firms would reveal many of the most powerful companies among the Fortune 500.

The Skull & Bones law firms are:

* Lord Day Lord

* Davis Polk Wardwell

* Simpson Thacher Bartlett

* Debevoise Plimpton Lyons & Gates

* Cravath Swaine & Moore

* Covington & Burling

* Dewey Ballantine Palmer & Woods

* Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy.

In addition to their corporate clientele and their direct involvement in government through the frequent appointment of partners to Cabinet posts, these firms also specialize in handling the personal financial affairs and investment portfolios of the leading WASP families. In this respect, the Skull & Bones-centered WASP Establishment imitates the Venetian model. During the height of power of Venice, which was the trading capital of the Byzantine Empire, the leading families used their personal wealth to establish insurance companies, family funds and cultural programs through which they extended their political power.

Today, the prominent law firms listed above play a special role in directing the affairs of the leading tax-exempt foundations which shape the culture and public opinion of the United States and many foreign countries. We have already seen that McGeorge Bundy, a leading Bonesman, left his position as National Security Adviser to President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation. During the nearly two decades that Bundy spent directing the $3 billion tax-exempt fund, he arguably wielded more power than he did during his six years as the National Security Adviser to two presidents. Under the Bundy reign the Ford Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars to launch the environmentalist movement and funded scores of projects devoted to population reduction in the Third World.

From its early decades, the Order has concentrated much of its efforts at establishing, controlling and, in some instances, capturing the major tax-exempt philanthropic foundations of America. The Russell Sage Foundation, which specializes in “social control” programs, was founded by Bonesmen. Among the leading functions of the Russell Sage Foundation today is the maintaining of a centralized tracking of the finances of all the large tax-exempt foundations in the United States. The Peabody Foundation, the Slater Foundation and several of the Rockefeller foundations were all either started by members of the Order or have been dominated by Bonesmen from their inception. Other major family funds, like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, were wrestled from family control by the Skull & Bones apparatus. During the tenure of McGeorge Bundy, two members of the Ford family resigned from the Ford Foundation in disgust over the direction in which Bundy had taken the philanthropic agency.

THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Between 1983-1986, the British-born conspiracy theorist Antony Sutton wrote a series of pamphlets about the Order of Skull & Bones. According to informed sources, Sutton was one of several historians who were provided with a large file of the Order’s internal documents, including minutes of some meetings, descriptions of rituals, and what would appear to be a rather complete list of its members from its founding through to the early 1980s. The short pamphlets were compiled into one volume and published as a book in 1986.

For someone closely following the just-concluded Persian Gulf War and attempting to gain some insight into George Bush’s performance during that largely orchestrated affair, one recurring theme in the Sutton volume stands out like a sore thumb: the New World Order.

According to the Skull & Bones documents used by Sutton in his somewhat flawed profile of the Order, the creation of a New World Order is a primary goal of the Bonesmen and has been for decades. For the initiates into the Order, the term New World Order has a very specific meaning.

It is a world dominated by American military power and American control over all strategic raw materials. Just as the Greek city-state of Sparta provided the Skull & Bones with the image of a WASP warrior caste, the Persian Empire, with its system of coalitions of satrap armies, provides the model for the Bonesmen’s New World Order. The image of Secretary of State James A. Baker III traveling from foreign capital to foreign capital demanding military legions or chests of gold to finance the war for a New World Order is an image straight out of the chronicles of the Persian Empire.

According to the recent biography of Henry Stimson, the man who inspired President Bush was firmly convinced that it was essential for America to go to war once every generation or so. It was, for Stimson, a spiritually cleansing process which enables the nation to rally behind a cause and overcome its weaknesses and shortcomings in one grand burst of military fervor. The romantic mystique of the purgative powers of combat is key to understanding the political philosophy of Skull & Bones.

Although America’s Vietnam debacle remains a bitter memory of the Bonesmen’s failure in war, the recent Persian Gulf conflict, with its massive overkill and the use of highly advanced weapons and technologies, is now the new glorious symbol of the WASP warrior caste’s reincarnation. When President Bush vowed that the Gulf War would not be another Vietnam, he was speaking first and foremost to his fellow Bonesmen — not to the American people. If such thinking smacks of dangerous fantasy on the part of a major world power in the modern era, it is indeed.

On a more practical political level, the Gulf War was a gambit to save the Bush presidency from a mounting pile of domestic financial woes, not the least of which was the savings and loan (S&L) crisis and a pending series of failures of major commercial banks. In the months preceding the Gulf showdown, the president’s own son, Neil Bush, came under intense media scrutiny for his role in the failure of a large S&L in Colorado. Neil’s photograph, testifying under oath before a congressional committee probing fraud among top S & L managers, became a familiar front-page feature in every major newspaper in America, threatening dangerous popular disillusion with the Yale Bonesman in the White House. With a U.S. federal government deficit projected at nearly a half a trillion dollars for Fiscal Year 1991, in large part because of the S&L crisis and a shrinking business tax base, the Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Congress was pressing for deep cutbacks in defense spending now that the Cold War had ended.

On the international stage, the reunification of Germany, clearly the most dramatic event of 1990, posed new challenges to the Bush team. Germany was about to emerge as the dominant power in continental Europe by virtue of its advanced industrial infrastructure and its long tradition of independent political dealings with Moscow. Just months before the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl had met with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and signed a long term economic assistance pact. As a result, Gorbachev dropped all remaining objections to the immediate reunification of Germany.

At that point, the Bush administration changed its tactics. Previously, in sharp contrast to the Thatcher government in Great Britain, it had been nominally in favor of German reunification. But at the Houston economic summit of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries in the summer of 1990, the United States blocked (with Britain) Germany’s plan of unconditional economic aid to the Soviet Union. President Bush took the position that the Soviet Union must submit to International Monetary Fund requisites as a precondition for any substantive economic assistance.

In the Far East, Japan’s continuing growth in manufacturing also posed a threat to Washington’s desire to retain superpower status. If President Bush and his Bonesmen coterie were unaware of a stunning historical analogy, their British “cousins” were quick to pick up on the parallels between the global strategic situation in July 1990 and the identical international situation that existed 100 years earlier.

In the 1890s, France, under the brilliant political leadership of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanataux, was attempting to forge a Eurasian alliance with Germany, Russia and Meiji Japan. The idea was to link continental Europe with Japan and China through a series of large overland infrastructure projects, beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Through treaties covering key areas of economic and security matters, Hanataux hoped to create a zone of prosperity, built on a foundation of rapid economic growth and extensive trade.

Such a political-economic common interest alliance threatened the imperial hegemony of Great Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Britain looked to the United States (as its English-speaking ally) to join in sabotaging the Hanataux plan. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Britain and her American junior partner (by then led by Henry Stimson’s old mentor Teddy Roosevelt) managed to disrupt the French-German-Russian-Japanese economic axis. Two world wars and the Great Depression were the consequences of that interference.

THE PERSIAN GULF WAR

It was against this historical backdrop that President Bush, invoking the World War II imagery of his Skull & Bones idol Henry Stimson, went to war against Iraq. There is even speculation that President Bush was personally instrumental in luring Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, thereby provoking the American-led military response. Many news accounts have emphasized that a two-hour private meeting between the president and Margaret Thatcher in the Aspen, Colorado vacation chalet of U.S. Ambassador Henry Catto on August 2, 1990 helped finalize Bush’s decision to immediately deploy military force.

Recently, an astute Japanese analyst drew a disturbing parallel between Bush and FDR, who was greatly influenced by Stimson. According to the writer, FDR lured Japan into World War II through an intricate series of economic warfare maneuvers which left Japan with little choice but to strike-back. In much the same way, said the analyst, Bush had lured Saddam Hussein into Kuwait in order to launch a new Gulf War that would have consequences reaching far beyond Iraq and the Middle East.

As a result of the military victory over Iraq, the United States is in the process of establishing a string of permanent military bases throughout the Persian Gulf and Near East. The oil sheikdoms of the region, led by Saudi Arabia, are now thoroughly dependent on the American military presence to ensure the survival of their regimes. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is effectively captured by Washington. American bankers aided by U.S. gunboats now are setting world oil prices. Thus, one consequence of the Persian Gulf War is that the United States now has an oil weapon — pointed principally at Germany and Japan. Ironically, America’s two chief economic rivals have paid out a total of $27 billion to date to help finance a Bush administration military adventure which put the oil weapon in Washington’s hand.

Another telling example of how the Order’s man in the Oval Office intends to administer a crumbling U.S. domestic economy while imposing the New World Order on the rest of the world is to be found in the recent buyout of the majority of stock in Citicorp, the largest U.S. commercial bank, by Saudi Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz. Citicorp is one of the major American commercial banks on the verge of collapse, but which is considered by the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve System to be “too big to fall.” The stock purchase amounted to a Saudi Royal Family bail-out of Citicorp, using the increased profits being enjoyed by the House of Saud as a result of the massive jump in Saudi oil production since the beginning of the Gulf crisis in August 1990.

There points up a striking difference between the role of the United States in World War II and the Bush administration’s handling to date of the Middle East crisis. During World War II, the United States went through a genuine economic revival. Skull & Bones historian Samuel Huntington described it as a “neo Hamiltonian” policy, a reference to the first United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Beginning in 1939, America became a major supplier of military and industrial goods under the Lend-Lease program to the European states fighting Hitler. At the same time, the federal government began issuing low-interest credits to revive the nation’s manufacturing base which had been gutted by a decade of economic depression. The industrial buildup accelerated once the United States formally entered .World War II, leading to the establishing of entirely new industrial sectors, such as aerospace and petrochemicals.

This time around — at least to date — there has been no such marshaling of the U.S. domestic industrial base. Despite moderate increases in the production of certain high-tech weapons systems, the U.S. economy continues its gradual slide into what could be a new depression. Unemployment is greater than at any point in the last decade. Some sociologists fear that the complete disintegration of America’s urban centers could produce new race-riots as early as the summer of 1991.

The single greatest challenge to George Bush and the Order is: Can they capitalize on the current revival of the American spirit to reverse the disastrous post-industrial society dogmas, and launch their own version of the World War II neo-Hamiltonian industrial recovery? So far, some doomsayers claim, it appears that Bush and his administration plan instead to direct their efforts at looting and blackmailing the rest of the world — especially the gulf oil sheikdoms, Japan and Germany — into bailing out the bankrupt U.S. financial houses and federal government and financing the posting of American-led foreign legions at every corner of the globe where there are large deposits of strategic raw materials. If this policy is not altered, George Bush may soon find himself presiding over a new disaster that will make the Vietnam debacle appear insignificant in comparison.

The politics of the New World Order appear to be borrowed largely from the pages of the decline and fall of the British Empire. Political columnist Patrick Buchanan, an early vocal opponent of the Bush Persian Gulf strategy, warned as early as August 1990 that the White House was falling into the trap of British “balance of power” politics, the very politics that left Great Britain on the scrap heap of world powers at the close of World War II, and put Winston Churchill, the architect of World War II and the Cold War, out of a job.

Since the crushing military defeat of Iraq by a technologically far superior American-led coalition, the Bush administration has vacillated on a postwar policy for the region. It has pursued a pragmatic power balancing game which is rife with potential problems. The two key elements of the American balance-of-power politics in the region are the preservation of a weakened but territorially whole Iraq to offset the other would-be regional-powers Iran and Syria. At the same time, it is tilting toward a nominally more “pro-Arab” position with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While the harsh reparations terms being imposed upon a war-devastated Iraq are probably, in the mind of Bush, aimed at dissuading any future regional military power from launching-cross-border aggressions, they amount to the slow, excruciating extermination of the population of that country. As one seasoned observer noted recently, earlier air wars had caused greater immediate losses of life, due to the inaccuracy of bombs and rockets, but had generally left basic infrastructures intact. The precision bombing of Iraq’s entire infrastructure has caused what a United Nations team has called an “apocalypse.” The greater loss of life will occur in the aftermath of the combat as a country with 16 million inhabitants is suddenly thrown into a “pre-industrial” state with no electricity, no water or other necessities. American humanitarian aid, administered by occupying troops, will not offset this apocalypse — especially if harsh war reparations and asset seizures deprive Iraq of the financial resources needed to begin a rebuilding process.

Regardless of the fact that the United States has not thrown the full weight of its military presence behind the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, the shortsightedness of the present Bush policy may very well lead to a Lebanon-type protracted civil war in Iraq. Such a war could potentially spread throughout the region.

IMPLICATIONS FOR JAPAN

Throughout this short study of the Order of Skull & Bones, emphasis has been placed on the philosophy, the rituals and the modus operandi of the Bonesmen who have devoted their post-Yale careers to world politics. This particular emphasis was chosen in order to provide the Japanese reader with an insight into how the Bush presidency views the rest of the world, so that it will be possible for Japan to better understand what it faces in the post-Persian Gulf War strategic environment.

The implications of Skull & Bones domination over American policymaking under the Bush presidency are enormous. Japan must be prepared to meet what amounts to a fundamentally new challenge. Few of the postwar experiences in U.S. Japanese relations will have prepared the Japanese government and the leaders of Japanese industry and finance for-what they now face.

In the recent past, the policy of Washington toward Japan has been simply to use political leverage, mostly related to Japan’s regional security concerns, to exact compromises and concessions in the economic and financial sphere. But the United States, under its policy of free trade, privatization of the monetary and credit mechanisms, and the transition to post-industrial service-oriented forms of economic activity at home, has suffered a gradual but steady decline over the past 20 to 30 years. Japan, meanwhile, has prospered under a more protectionist and industry oriented policy.

In the past decade, Japan has been increasingly thrust into the role of scapegoat for the decline of American prosperity, while at the same time coming under mounting pressure to help finance the United States out of its economic mess. The pressures upon Japan to bail out its postwar big brother have caused tensions between Washington and Tokyo, but the Cold War had provided a common security interest that generally offset the occasional rough language.

Under the George Bush Skull & Bones regime at the White House all that has changed. True to the Bonesmen’s credo of constructive chaos and global political domination by the WASP Establishment, the United States is now out to dominate U.S.-Japanese relations with a degree of brutal frankness that will fly in the face of all previous American sensitivities to Japan’s honor. Gone are the days of former U.S. Ambassador Michael Mansfield, who always sought to maintain a public climate of friendship and cooperation between the two nations even when behind the scenes he was taking the toughest of stands on the most divisive issues.

Under the American-led New World Order, Japan can expect to be treated with far less respect publicly. It can expect that the Bush administration, including his coterie of former top CIA men now working directly out of the Oval Office, will be constantly interfering, covertly in the internal affairs of Nippon.

This shift in style has held sway since the Bush inauguration and the subsequent appointment of Michael Armacost as U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo. Armacost has assumed the posture of a Roman pro-consul, dictating policy to a weak satrap, rather than to engage, in diplomatic dialogue. Armacost’s performance even before the recent events in the Persian Gulf reestablished American military might as the defining factor in world affairs — should have provided the Japanese leadership with a clue as to the shift under way in Washington’s new policy approach.

The Bush policy can best be described as a sophisticated containment policy. The new approach to Pacific affairs was telegraphed in the early days of the Bush administration when the president deployed three of his most trusted senior spooks to three critical Asian diplomatic posts: Armacost was sent to Tokyo; Bush’s vice presidential national security aide and former career CIA operator Donald Gregg was sent to Seoul; and John Lilly, another career CIA man and a fellow Yale Skull & Bones member, was sent to Beijing. The fact that three of the CIA’s most experienced clandestine field operators were assigned the senior diplomatic posts says a great deal about the Bush administration’s intentions to conduct sophisticated political-warfare and sow confusion among the three major nations of the Far East. Bush clearly intends to pursue the historic Skull & Bones mission of extending America’s dominion over the entire Pacific region. The idea of even paying lip service to equal partnership between Washington and Tokyo is over, at least for the time being.

The process of internally weakening Japan’s resistance to this overarching domination by Washington’s New World Order began with the Recruit scandal, when the Takeshita government was brought down through a U.S.-inspired secret intelligence operation. One of the primary targets of that operation was Yashuhiro Nakasone, the former prime minister and the architect of Japan’s post-1973 effort to develop independent ties to the oil-producing Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

It is important to understand that Bush’s WASP warriors, while adopting a similar approach of non-compromise and domination over Israel and the Zionist lobby inside the United States, will not hesitate to use the Jewish lobby as an instrument for bashing Japan into line. Thus, Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher went out of his way to encourage the Anti-Defamation League’s leadership convention, which he addressed last year, to join with the Bush administration in pressuring Japan to submit to American free trade demands.

The Bush administration will at times encourage the Zionist lobby and Israel to mercilessly attack Japan and will at other times severely criticize Zionist “insensitivity” to Tokyo. This will all be part of the Bush strategy to dominate the Pacific Rim by playing one country or faction off against another, using hard cop-soft cop and other classic techniques of the intelligence trade.

Japan will be offered a limited junior partner status in the New World Order, while coming under mounting pressure to continue providing tribute to finance the American imperium. Above all else, Japan will be forbidden from developing any independent foreign policy toward its neighbors, the Soviet Union, the Arab world or anyone else. Such programs as the Global Infrastructure Fund, to the extent that they pose an alternative to the U.S.-dominated international regime, will be vetoed.

As a subservient junior partner in the New World Order arrangement, Japan’s financial and economic muscle will be used as the piggy-bank for U.S. imperial objectives. The $14 billion “contribution” to the U.S.-led Gulf-War coalition was another benchmark in the transition in U.S.-Japanese relations, as was President Bush’s abrupt cancellation of his long-sheduled state visit to Tokyo. When the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) attempted to visit Kuwait immediately after the gulf cease-fire in March l991, the U.S. State Department refused to grant him permission to go into the American-occupied territory. These intentional diplomatic affronts should be understood as telling signs of the new American-Japanese relationship.

On the other-hand, President Bush also suddenly scheduled a brief summit with Japanese Prime Minister Kaifu in Newport Beach, California for April 4, 1991. One purpose of the sudden meeting was to lay out clear parameters of acceptable behavior on the part of the Japanese government when the prime minister meets later in April with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Japanese Soviet relations, like all other crucial Japanese foreign relations, will be expected to conform with those of the U.S.

An essential blackmail “stick” that the Bush administration intends to hold over Tokyo is-Japanese dependency on Persian Gulf oil. As-the result of the Gulf War and the post war American military occupation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other-key oil-producing sheikdoms, the Bush administration will exert unabashed control over world oil supplies — and prices. In the New World Order, Japan’s oil supply will be increasingly linked to concessions on a range of monetary and economic issues, including the Global Agreements on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) talks, which broke up last year as the result of largely Japanese and continental European resistance to the pure free-trade system sought by Bush and Thatcher. Assistant Treasury Secretary David Mulford, a former senior official at White Weld Securities, Inc., which restructured Saudi Arabia’s entire financial apparatus, has recently announced that he will seek to prosecute Japan for its violations of the GATT regulations that call upon Tokyo to surrender government control over interest rate policies to the international banking community.

The Bush presidency, with its ambitious drive for domination over former friends and foes alike, poses an unprecedented challenge to Japan. While this is neither the time nor the place to offer a solution to the growing dilemma, the profile of the men of Skull & Bones in this white paper should provide the Japanese reader with helpful insights into the nature of the American WASP warrior class and the secret society which spawned it.

“Skull and Bones: A Short History.” Executive Intelligence Review, January 30, 1980.

Stimson, Henry and McGeorge Bundy. In Active Service in Peace and War. Octagon Press, New York, 1949

Sutton, Antony C. America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones. Liberty Press, Billings, Mont., 1986.

Winks, Robin. Cloak and Gown Scholars in the Secret War William Morrow, New York, 1987.

Some Prominent Members of Skull & Bones:

William F. Buckley, Jr. (Bones Class of 1950):

Founder of National Review, the leading conservative magazine in the United States. Brother James (Skull & Bones l944) is now a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals. William F. Buckley, Jr., former CIA officer in Mexico, also built the political grassroots conservative movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. President Bush and Buckley have recently split over Buckley’s strong pro-lsraelism.

McGeorge Bundy (Skull & Bones initiate of 1940):

Scion of the Skull & Bones Bundy family. Father Harvey H. Bundy was Skull & Bones, as was brother William P. Bundy. McGeorge served in the War Department during World War II as Henry Stimson’s assistant and later became the National Security Adviser to President Kennedy. William Bundy became a CIA official and later served in key positions at the Departments of State and Defense. McGeorge headed the Ford Foundation (1968-1980) and William chaired the Council on Foreign Relations (1972-1983).

George Bush (initiated in 1948):

President of the United States. Comes from a complete Bones family. Father Prescott, a Bones initiate of the class of 1917. Uncle George Herbert Walker, Bones Class of 1927. U S Federal District Court Judge John Walker is also a relative and a Bonesman.

Alfred Cowles (Class of 1913):

Built the Cowles Communication empire based on the Des Moines (lowa) Register and the Minneapolis (Minnesota) Star and Tribune. These two newspapers play a significant role in shaping the early presidential primaries, especially in Iowa.

Hugh Cunningham (Bones 1934):

CIA man from 1947 to 1973. He served in top positions in the Clandestine Services, the Board of National Estimates and later as Director of Training.

Thomas Daniels (initiated in 1914):

Founder of the largest agro-business and grain cartel company in Minnesota — Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM). Served in the Foreign Service and later during World War II as head of the Fats and Oils Section of the War Production Board. ADM Corporation’s new head Dwayne Andreas is one of the most powerful figures in U.S.-Soviet trade relations. Daniels’s only son, John (Bones 1943), also works in ADM. The bank which underwrites ADM stock issues is the Morgan Stanley investment bank

Richard Ely Danielson (Skull & Bones 1907):

Past publisher of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, one of the leading magazines for seeing which policy line on a variety of issues is coming out of the Eastern Establishment.

Russell Wheeler Davenport (initiated in 1923):

Fortune magazine writer and editor, made this magazine the leading authority on financial matters in the United States. Davenport created the Fortune 500 companies list.

Henry P. Davison (Bones Class of l920):

Key senior partner in the Morgan banking and financial trust networks. His fellow Bonesman Harold Stanley (1908) founded the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Davison and his family helped set up the Guaranty Trust Corporation which became Morgan Guaranty Thomas Cochran (1904 Bonesman) was one of the most powerful partners in the Morgan bank. The influence of the Morgan banking system can be seen in its relationship with the hierarchy of U.S. intelligence. The head of the Office of Strategic Services, Gen. William Donovan, worked as a Morgan intelligence operative in the 1920s and prepared the intelligence reports for the Morgan banking concerns on developments in Europe. F. Trubee Davison became CIA Director of Personnel in 1951 and placed key Bonesmen in the right positions inside the CIA.

Averell Harriman (1913 initiate):

Scion of the Harriman railroad family. His brother Roland (Skull & Bones 1917) ran the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman. Averell was one of the most powerful members of the Skull & Bones fraternity, His government posts ranged from Ambassador to Russia during World War II and various State Department positions to chief negotiator on the Vietnam Talks. Confidential adviser to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and later Nixon and Carter. His investment banking firm is virtually a Skull & Bones bank&Mac220;nine senior partners are from Skull & Bones. President Bush’s father worked in Brown Brothers Harriman after helping to merge several companies in the United Rubber Corporation of America.

Winston Lord (Bones Class of 1959):

Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (1983-l988). Former State Department official and CIA officer in Asia. China expert. Six members of the Lord family were Skull & Bones, including Charles Edwin Lord, former Comptroller of the Currency, Department of the Treasury. Oswald Bates Lord (Skull & Bones l926) married Mary Pillsbury of the Minnesota based Pillsbury Flour Corporation. Winston Lord is their son.

Robert A. Lovett (1918 initiate):

Put together the Brown Brothers Harriman merger and later organized the aviation industry mobilization for World War II. Became part of the most exclusive power group in World War II under Henry Stimson. Lovett was one of the five or six most powerful men in the United States for nearly 40 years until his death in 1986.

Henry Luce (initiated in 1920):

Built the Time-Life publishing empire. Became the leading publicist of the “American century” doctrine.

Dino Pionzio (Bones Class of 1950):

CIA deputy chief of station in Chile during the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende. Now works at the investment firm Dillion Read.

Alphonso Taft (initiated in 1833):

Secretary of War (1876), Attorney General (1876-1877) and later Minister to Austria and Russia. Co-founder of Skull & Bones.

Robert A. Taft (1910 initiate):

Speaker of the House of Representatives (1921-1926) and Senator (R-Ohio). Leader of the Isolationist movement in the 1930s. His son Robert A. Taft, Jr., also senator from Ohio, led the right-wing of the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Robert A. Taft, Jr., however, was the only member of the Taft family who was not Skull & Bones.

William H. Taft (Skull & Bones 1878):

President of the United States (1908-1912) and appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1921-1930). Secretary of War (1904-1908). Trustee, Carnegie Institution. Part of the long line of Tafts who served in the U.S. government.

William Collins Whitney (initiated 1863):

Secretary of the Navy (1885-1889). Promoter of the Naval Shipyards and financier. Part of the Whitney family which sent eight of its members to Yale to become Skull & Bonesmen. Family intermarried with the Payne, Harriman and Vanderbilt clans. The Whitneys became some of Wall Street’s most powerful financiers through the Guaranty and Knickerbocker Trust Companies.

Current U.S. senators who are Skull & Bones members:

Sen. Jonathan Bingham (D-N.M.).

Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.); Former Navy Secretary and on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.): Recently killed in an airplane crash. was a Bonesman as was his father. The Heinz family has one of the largest food-producing companies in the world.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.): Formerly on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kerry is now on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Selected Quotations:

— During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, two Skull & Bones advisers to President Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy and Robert Lovett, met in the west wing of the White House to discuss strategy. According to author Godfrey Hodgson, there was a photograph of master Bonesman Henry L. Stimson, their mentor, on Lundy’s desk. “All during the conversation the old Colonel seemed to be staring me straight in the face,” recalled Lovett. Finally, he said to Bundy, “Mac, I think the best service we can perform for the president is to try to approach this as Colonel Stimson would.”

— At the Potsdam summit in 1946 when President Truman first met Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Stimson told the president: “The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.”

— Commenting on the plan of Robert Morgenthau, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, to deindustrialize Germany after World War II, Stimson wrote: “. . . just such a crime as the Germans themselves hoped to perpetrate on their victims . . . a crime against civilization itself?” He added rather ironically that the plan was like “a beautiful Nazi program! This is to laugh!”

— “They possessed a common background, common experience, and a common liking for old wines, proper English and Savile Row clothing,” wrote the biographer of former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew. A top level diplomat and State Department powerhouse during the first half of the 20th century, Bonesman Hugh Wilson adds, “The Foreign Service [is] a pretty good club.”

— “These men helped establish a distinguished network connecting Wall Street, Washington, worthy foundations and proper clubs,” wrote historian and former JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “The New York financial and legal community was the heart of the American Establishment. Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root; its present leaders, Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy; its front organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations.”

— British author Godfrey Hodgson stated in an essay on the American Establishment that it was “characteristic of these men to take on the burdens of world power with a certain avidity… It reflected a grim but grand duty that was a legacy from half-buried layer of New England Puritanism.”

— Averell Harriman’s father, owner of the largest railroad company in the United States at the turn of the century, told his son: “Great wealth is an obligation and responsibility. Money must work for the country.”

— “I scoffed at Harvard’s Porcellian club. It was too smug. But to get into Bones, you had to do something for Yale, wrote Averell Harriman. He would frequently return to the “Tomb on High Street.” During the Paris Peace Conference on the Vietnam War, Harriman was quite upset about not being able to attend a “Bones Reunion.” In the book The Wise Men, Harriman is described as willing to talk openly about national security affairs, but “he refused, however, to tell [even] his family anything about Bones… so complete was his trust in Bones’s code of secrecy…”

— Stimson during the liberation of France in 1944 wrote about the need for France’s reconstruction following the Nazi occupation of France: “America cannot supervise the elections of a great country like France. Consequently, we must eventually leave the execution of the State Department formula to the French themselves… where we ourselves will assume responsibility in part or more for its execution according to Anglo-Saxon ideals.”

— Stimson on Austria and Germany following World War II: “They [the British] haven’t any grasp apparently of the underlying need of proper economic arrangements to make peace stick… If they restore Austria to her position in which she was left by the Versailles arrangement 25 years ago, why they would reduce her to a non-self-sustaining state [is beyond me]… Central Europe after the war has got to eat. She has got to be free of tariffs in order to eat.”

— Stimson was “opposed to a Carthaginian Peace” in which Germany was reduced to a non functioning society. He wrote, “The Ruhr and Saarland… [must not] be turned into a second rate industrial land . . . regardless of what it means to Germany… [rather] to the welfare of the entire continent “

— In 1948, the debate within the U.S. government over the creation of the state of Israel was reaching critical intensity. President Truman was the “dark horse” candidate to defeat the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey. Truman thought he needed the Jewish groups to mobilize in his support in order to get elected. He also believed that after so many years of suffering and persecution, the Jews deserved a homeland of their own. However, his most trusted foreign policy advisers, George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett, were, according to the book The Wise Men, “all dead set against the birth of Israel… However humanitarian a Jewish homeland might seem… it posed a real risk to U.N. national security. It was absolutely vital that the U.S. maintain its pipeline to Mideast oil. Supporting the Zionist cause would only antagonize the Arabs.” Lovett said, “Israel was one ally too many “

— On Japan, Stimson and McGeorge Bundy wrote their book On Active Service in Peace and War: “Since 1937, when the Japanese attacked China, Stimson had been urging, as a private citizen, an embargo on all American trade with Japan, and this attitude he carried with him into the Cabinet [when he became Secretary of War].” Stimson prepared a memorandum in 1940 pointing out how Japan had yielded before American firmness, in her withdrawal from Shantung and Siberia in 1919 and her acceptance of naval inferiority in 1921. “Japan,” Stimson wrote, “has historically shown that she can misinterpret a pacifistic policy of the United States for weakness. She has also historically shown that when the United States indicates by clear language and bold actions that she intends to carry out a clear and affirmative policy in the Far East, Japan will yield to that policy even though it conflicts with her own Asiatic policy and conceived interests. For the United States now to indicate either by soft words or inconsistent actions that she has no such clear and definite policy towards the Far East will only encourage Japan to bolder action.”

— On December 7, 1941, Stimson wrote in his diary: “When the news first came that Japan had attacked us, my first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed. For I feel that this country united has practically nothing to fear, while the apathy and division stirred by unpatriotic men have been hitherto very discouraging.”

— On the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Stimson wrote in an article for Harper’s Weekly in 1947: “My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of men in the armies which I had helped to raise. In the light that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.”

— At the Truman White House in the presence of Secretary of State James Byrnes, Adm. Leahy and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, according to his biographer: “Stimson had argued consistently for a commitment to allow the Japanese to keep their Emperor, not because- with the memory of Manchuria in his mind he had any special sympathy for him, but because only the Emperor could persuade the Japanese to surrender and therefore save American lives.”

Secret societies have a problem; they depend on publicity to earn their mystique. The Skull and Bones Society at Yale University need have no fears on that front at least. One of the oddities of this year’s Presidential election is not that George W Bush and Senator John Kerry were near contemporaries at Yale – although their privileged backgrounds are worth noting in a country that prides itself on its democratic, meritocratic traditions – but that they were also members of the same “secret” society.

The Skull and Bones, which dates from 1832, may now be the most famous such institution in the United States. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that the myth should have begun to outstrip its comparatively humdrum present-day reality. In the past Skull and Bones had close connections with the CIA and many of the architects of post-war American foreign policy, such as Averill Harriman, were Bonesmen. “The only agenda of Skull and Bones is to get its members into positions of power and then to have those members hire others to positions of prominence. The organisation has an enormous superiority complex that partly fuels their secrecy,” argues Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power.

As Ron Rosenbaum, a classmate of Bush’s, wrote in a famous Esquire article in 1977 the idea behind Skull and Bones was once that of “converting the idle progeny of the ruling class into morally serious leaders of the establishment”.

Interest in the society’s activities could only be piqued by the revelation that the 15 members recruited – or tapped – each year would have to lie in an open coffin while recounting their life story and deepest, most personal existential fears and phobias.

As an article in Bush’s 1968 yearbook recounted, “the initiate faces the delegation and the alumni alone and is physically beaten. Next he is stripped and made to engage in some form of naked wrestling.” Later in the year the fledgling Bonesman would be “quite brutally evaluated by the others”.

Both Bush’s father and grandfather had been Bonesmen – as had another future President, William Howard Taft – and it was widely assumed that young George would follow in the family tradition. For a while however it appeared that George W might join an open, blithely jolly and hedonistic society, the “Gin and Tonic” instead. But, according to his biographer Bill Minutaglio, his father, then a US Congressman, visited his son at Yale and asked him to join Skull and Bones.

Yet even then, however, the societies were in decline. The Yale Daily News reported that “even social prestige is declining as a reason to join a society … the number of undergraduates who regard society members with suspicion rather than fear and admiration has been growing.” Yale in the 1960s was changing fast, trying to shake off its preppy, privileged past and opening its doors to students from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom had little time and often much contempt for the old days and ways.

Bush maintained a “gentleman’s C” grade average throughout his time at Yale and never became involved in campus politics. But although the future President would say in his ghost-written “autobiography,” that: “We were young men trying to enjoy what should have been the last carefree days of youth,” his time in New Haven played a part in his future rejection of his New England ancestry as he reinvented himself as a bona fide Texan.

“What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous,” he has said, and it seems reasonable to conclude that Yale, however inadvertently, played a part in convincing the younger Bush to reject, at least outwardly, the trappings of privilege.

Kerry was not so quick to shrink from Yale’s high society. A champion debater at the university Kerry was, as his diplomat father would have expected, involved in political life on campus. He was leader of the University Liberal club and Kerry’s ponderous gravity made it clear that this was a serious young man intent on a serious future.

The future Senator retained an affection for the club well beyond graduation. In 1986 he tapped Jacob Weisberg, now the editor of the online magazine slate.com, for membership. Weisberg was appalled that a liberal Senator from Massachusetts would countenance and encourage membership of a secret society that at that point still did not admit women. He turned down the opportunity to join.

By 1992 Skull and Bones had finally decided to admit women. Black and Jewish students had been admitted, albeit in comparatively small numbers, for decades, but now the final frontier fell. Since then, Yalies report, the society has become less significant; not, they stress, because women have been admitted but because the secret societies are seen as an anachronism. Indeed, few think they even necessarily attract the best and the brightest any more, being concerned with ensuring that they have a sufficiently diverse membership that comes close to mirroring the student body as a whole. In the Ivy League these days even secrets have to be politically correct.

In recent interviews, NBC’s Tim Russert has asked both men about their membership in the society. “Is there a secret handshake? Is there a secret code?” he asked Kerry.

“I wish there were something secret I could manifest there,” replied the Democratic candidate. Bush for his part, quipped, “It’s so secret we can’t talk about it.”

In replying to these questions, both men were breaking a cardinal Bonesman rule – namely that when the club was mentioned in conversation a Bonesman should leave the room or deny membership in such a way that his denial both confirmed his membership and brought the discussion to an end.

As Rosenbaum argues, “The preoccupation with bones, mortality, with coffins, lying in coffins, standing around coffins, all this sort of thing, I think, is designed to give them the sense that – and it’s very true – life is short. You can spend it, if you have a privileged background, enjoying yourself, contributing nothing, or you can spend it making a contribution.”